John Berger
John Berger
John Peter Bergeris an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth5 November 1926
artist giving desire
The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.
wall shopping shadow
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.
men animal sea
The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
children world young
Nothing fortuitous happens in a child's world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.
photography memories cameras
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
art doors engineering
Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko… all believed in the social role of art… Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering; music with painting; poetry with design; fine art with propaganda; photographs with typography; diagrams with action; the studio with the street…
messages language advertising
Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
art revenge past
[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. . . .
white drawing use
I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase. For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
art cinema vagrants
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
poetry together violence
Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart...
space giving narrative
Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
home men dwelling-place
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
dream publicity culture
Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.